By Liu Shinan

Teaching made up well over a quarter of my working career, so I have a strong campus complex. I closely follow any news about teachers. Yesterday, a piece of such news upset me greatly.

Hui Zhimin, a 42-year old teacher in Ningxian County, Gansu Province, was dismissed recently after working as a "substitute teacher" for 21 years. He was one of the 448,000 teachers of his kind across the country the Ministry of Education plans to disqualify before an unspecified deadline in the near future.

A "substitute teacher" is one employed to teach in a primary or middle school but is not on the official payroll. Employing substitute teachers has been a common practice in rural areas, especially in remote and mountainous regions, because of a shortage of qualified teachers. They are mostly high school graduates who did not go to a university or college.

Although not having an eligible education background for teaching, the substitutes make up a fairly large part of the teaching staff in less developed areas and are heavily underpaid. According to an investigation conducted by a senior government official of Weiyuan County in Gansu Province, most substitute teachers were paid less than 80 yuan (US$10) a month and 70 percent of them were paid only 40 yuan a month. Weiyuan probably is an extreme example, but typically an official teacher's salary can be used to pay several substitute teachers.

Thirty years ago, I was a middle school teacher in a mountainous county in my home province in Central China. I remember that my substitute teacher colleagues were paid about one fourth or one third what I earned. But they were no less experienced and devoted than I in imparting knowledge to students, teaching them how to be good citizens and completing other tasks a teacher was required to do at that time. They never complained.

The story of Hui I read yesterday surprised me. I didn't expect that, after so many years, there are still so many substitute teachers and they are still so underpaid. What is more upsetting is that the Ministry of Education is determined to "qing tui," or "sort out and discharge" as the Chinese official jargon states, these teachers.

Anyone who is familiar with China's bureaucratic vocabulary understands that the true weight of "qing tui" is on "tui" (discharge) though "qing" (sort out) may leave some hope of keeping the substitute teachers and converting them to official status. That hope is actually slim. According to the spokesman of the Ministry of Education, a substitute teacher can "become a certified teacher by passing the employment tests organized by the local education authorities according to needs" and the precondition for participating in these tests is that the teacher "has eligible education background, has good quality and has acquired the qualifications for teaching."

These prerequisites are tantamount to rejection. First, the poor teachers have to spend several years to acquire that "eligible education," then they have to pass the employment test. According to the spokesman, the "qing tui" will be completed "in a very short period of time." Can the teachers gain these qualifications before the authorities accomplish the "qing tui?"

The "qing tui" is particularly unfair for middle-aged substitute teachers like Hui. They have devoted their golden age to the education of the younger generation and they helped the government solve the difficulty in providing education in poverty-stricken areas by accepting low wages. By now they have lost the capability to take on a new profession and the strength for manual labour.

One of the considerations behind the "qing tui" move is that all teachers should hold a degree of higher learning. This is reasonable for improving the quality of the nation's teaching staff. But we should not set it as a criterion for those senior substitute teachers to continue their teaching careers.

Just compare an experienced substitute teacher and a young person who has newly graduated from a college. I dare say the former is much, much more qualified for the teaching post.

Of course, putting these teachers on the regular payroll may cause a considerable increase in the State budget. The increase, however, is a must. No other expenses are more important than education. A little squeeze on other expenses may well meet this need. For instance, a study by a research panel of the Economy Forecast Department under the State Information Centre indicates that banquets hosted with public funds across the country cost 370 billion yuan (US$ 46.3 billion) in 2004. Another study showed that the cost of overseas trips using public money was 200 billion yuan (US$25 billion) in the same year.

Suppose the middle-aged teachers like Hui made up two thirds of all substitute teachers and their monthly salary increase is 1,200 yuan (US$148) after being put on a regular payroll, the annual increase in the State budget would be only 4.3 billion yuan (US$540 million).

(China Daily November 9, 2006)